Monday, April 14, 2008

NurseryGeorge now has a place at his (Or actually our) chosen nursery for June. We went to sign him in on Saturday. The place is usually pretty relaxed considering the number of young children running around. But this was their open day and it was bedlam…mainly I think because the parents of East Dulwich are willing to kill to get places at a good nursery - anyway we’ve put our deposit down and we’re in!

I carried George around while Lisa filled in the forms. George had probably never seen so many children before…. Lisa had been to meet Sofia’s new baby, Elwin on Friday and George had thrown a jealous fit when she’d picked the other baby up – but today, George was happy to see the other kids rushing around smiling.

Although, I did see him looking at some helium balloons with a resigned air of puzzlement….”well that puts my theory of gravitation out the window” I could almost see him thinking.

Lisa has had to sign up with the same osteopath who calmed George down last week – her shoulder has been very painful and the osteopath said he gets this all the time – babies get heavier and parents don’t realise they’re using shoulder muscles they never needed before. Come to think of it, I’ve had similar shoulder strains… mind you, I am nearly 40….

The marathon mealSaturday night I left Lisa and George and had dinner with Evelyn, Martin and Ellen. Evelyn was running the marathon on Sunday and was having a last boost of carbs before the big race.

I noticed this at Victoria station:

apparently they have toilets for daleks… that’s useful to know.

the marathonAnyway…. on Sunday we went to watch the marathon – we met up with Russ and Pietro along with Pietro’s dad. We’d decided to watch for half an hour or so, but amazingly (considering there were 35,000 runners) we saw Evelyn.

She seemed to be doing well and although she later said things got a lot tougher later on, she finished the course and is now suffering….

We on the other hand applauded and cheered a few more people (George of course thought all the applause was for him) and then found a rather posh restaurant in Shad Thames who didn’t mind having George and who were offering a bit of a deal on Sunday lunch. Luckily George was having a fantastic day – he was happy and friendly all the way through.. and didn’t make any fuss in the restaurant.

On the bus on the way home, we were sitting opposite someone who’d just run the marathon. She wasn’t best pleased when the bus without warning turned round and headed back the wrong way. When we eventually got off in the rain, we had to find another bus to get home…the driver was apparently supposed to have made an announcement, but didn’t. By the time we’d waited for another bus, the runner was seizing up. We even offered to get her a cab, but we couldn’t find one.

Weddings and DimetrodonsToday I managed to get most of the next video newsletter written and finished off another chapter of the book… Strangely, both pieces of writing featured tutorials on how to shoot a wedding video….

Hopefully the book will be done ahead of deadline which will be great because the advert – which I’m supposed to be making for Maltese TV is going to be a big rush. The person dealing with me has been off for a few days and is now sorting through a mass of emails before getting to mine – and I really need some info and photos from him before I can do any more work on the add….

The end of the month will be tough at this rate so if I can get the book finished early it’ll be very useful.

I’m also still trying to make some prehistoric missing links for science photo library – Dimetrodon was my project for this afternoon and he’s coming on well (although he still needs some realistic skin textures… oh, and some teeth:

some of the questions I'm grappling with... read on if you want to find out how I cope:

I'm a freelance writer, illustrator and animator, and having just finished my first documentary (on the evolution of sharks) I've now started work on my second (on interstellar travel)... if you want to see how I get on, read on.